The Untapped Power of Events: Driving Growth in Tech

In this episode of the podcast, we’re diving into how events can be powerful drivers of growth in the tech industry. With long sales cycles and complex buying processes, tech brands need more than just brand awareness, they need meaningful engagement and measurable results.

Join Laliv Hadar, SVP of Marketing at Invision, as she speaks with Jeremy Youett, Head of Proprietary Events, Atlassian, to explore how events can transform from one-off activations to always-on engines of growth. With experience at Microsoft, Smartsheet, and now Atlassian, Jeremy shares insights on how to drive pipeline acceleration, deepen customer relationships, and create measurable business impact.

Key takeaways:

• Why in-person events remain irreplaceable for building trust and accelerating sales.
• How to shift from one-off events to an evergreen, integrated event strategy.
• Tips for content atomization—turning event content into a continuous engagement stream.
• Metrics that matter: How to prove event ROI beyond attendance.
• The role of emerging technology (including AI) in shaping the future of events.

Whether you're a marketer looking to elevate your event strategy, a tech brand leader, or just curious about how in-person experiences can drive growth, this episode is packed with practical insights.

Transcript

Laliv Hadar (00:10): 

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Invision Podcast, Inside the Brand Experience, where we discuss trends and approaches that cut through the noise and allow brands to own every moment with their customers. I'm Laliv Hadar, SVP of Marketing for Invision. Today we're diving into the power of experiences as a strategic growth driver in the tech space. With long sales cycles and complex buying processes, events can do more than just build brand awareness. They can fuel pipeline, deepen engagement, and drive real business results. Let's unpack how to shift the perception of events from one-off activations to always-on engines of growth. Today, I'm fortunate to have Jeremy Youett from Atlassian join us. Jeremy has an impressive track record and career as a marketing leader, strategist and storyteller. Formerly with Smartsheet and Microsoft, he now calls Atlassian home and heads up their proprietary events. Jeremy also sits on the advisory board of the Corporate Events Marketing Association or CEMA, as do I, and I've had the pleasure of getting to know him more over the past few weeks and I'm excited to have him on the show today. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. 

Jeremy Youett (01:29): 

Thank you for having me. 

Laliv Hadar (01:29): 

Thank you for being here. So wonderful. I'm super excited for our conversation today. Let's dive in. Let's talk about the changing perception of events in tech B2B. So in tech B2B, the sales process as we know can be long and can involve many decision-makers. So how do marketing events uniquely support pipeline acceleration compared to other marketing channels? 

Jeremy Youett (01:56): 

Yeah, that's a great question and I think one of the things that we learned coming out of the pandemic is that there's a desire for humans to connect in person. And we can see this by the demand for in-person events coming in the last couple of years and still ramping up, it's still growing year over year each year. And the reason for that is the human connection enables us to deepen our connection with a brand, with individuals, with other partners within our ecosystem. And so certainly to your question, the sales process does get longer as enterprise companies grow their offerings and grow their business. And so one way of circumventing that is through in-person events. And I think one of, or a couple of the values of in-person events that make it a rightfully kind of experience-oriented moment for people to connect are the reasons that people are still coming to them. 

(02:52): 

So think about the number of people from one account that can come to an event versus having to get on a phone call. At our recent flagship event, some of our big accounts sent 12, 13, 14, 15 people that otherwise don't get to engage with us in person like that or with each other in that way. So you can build trust faster, you can deepen relationships more quickly. You can spend a couple of days achieving deeper conversations. You can offer hands-on product exposure and experience to interact with your products, your solutions and your brand. And all of those things are irreplaceable. They can only be done live. And I think that is part of the value and part of the reason that in-person experience is so rich and so ripe from moving business forward quickly. 

(03:39): 

But also not only does it create urgency and momentum by being live versus getting off a Zoom call and being able to avail a salesperson. It helps us internally to align so we have an opportunity to connect with ... Connect sales and marketing together in these kind of in-person moments. We get a real time feedback loop that doesn't exist by scheduling 30-minute meetings across a calendar. And those experiences and the ability to connect with people in person to read faces and to hear conversations also reveal a lot about buying signals which you don't necessarily get a chance to see or hear on scheduled Zoom calls or Teams calls. So for all of those reasons, marketing events are a unique and rich engagement opportunity and they do really help to drive pipeline acceleration compared to digital touches and digital marketing channels. 

Laliv Hadar (04:39): 

Great, thank you for that. What a wonderful answer. Many companies still view events as one-off activations rather than an ongoing marketing engine. What are some ways marketers can shift this mindset internally? And can you share some from your experiences at Atlassian or before that and what approaches and tactics you might've used to sort of change this conversation? 

Jeremy Youett (05:07): 

I've been at companies that have been very, very large like Microsoft and much smaller tech companies like Smartsheet. Atlassian fits somewhere in the middle there. And one of the great things about the tech industry is that they do tend to have more event activations in a calendar year as part of their business cycle to drive engagement with customers and to close deals. So there is this kind of evergreen sense or approach to the strategy, which that's really difficult if you're really only doing one event a year to create a moment that is part of an omnichannel strategy. Doing one thing one time a year makes it harder for lots of reasons. So one of the benefits for these tech companies that I've worked at is that they have this evergreen strategy and the engagement continues every couple of months depending on the account and the type of event that you're driving. 

(06:06): 

But I think one of the ways to best answer your question is to think about what's the attribution of the event to pipeline. My team at Atlassian is proprietary events. So it's customer-facing events, they are marketing events and they're very different things than say internal events and different again from third party events. 

(06:25): 

Now, third party event strategy is much more top of funnel activation. It's about creating new connections, prospecting, creating and getting new leads into your funnel. Whereas the kind of events that my team right now are accountable for is driving connection with existing accounts to expand pipeline, to grow opportunities and to accelerate deal times. And so they have a very different function and I think a holistic event strategy wants to include a mix of all of those things to create a really great robust evergreen event strategy that sits as part of the marketing engine within all of the other channels and tactics that you might use to drive engagement from all angles, whether that's prospecting or from existing accounts. 

(07:15): 

I think some of the things that marketers can do to try and shift their thinking about events as being a one-off activity is what are the ways that you're embedding the event in the life cycle of the customer marketing effort that you have? So think about what is the point in the journey for a customer where the event happens? Is it the start of a campaign or is it the end? They have two very different types of events and messages. 

(07:42): 

One of the things that Atlassian does really well is use its two flagship moments a year, one in the U.S. and one in Europe as the start of a campaign and a customer journey. So we'll use it as a launch for announcements. Those product announcements affect different teams within the company and they all have PR moments resulting from those announcements and then campaigns that follow them. So it's very thoughtful and it really uses and gets ROI from the investment in the event to do exactly what you're saying, which is shift the mindset of folks from, "Hey, we're doing this one event a year," to thinking about the event as the start or end of a much more robust journey within the marketing life cycle. 

Laliv Hadar (08:28): 

Great. And I think this next section really dovetails well with your previous comment and how, especially at Atlassian, you guys are looking at events and really figuring out where they fit in the funnel and if they're top of the funnel or middle or just something else entirely. It is something near and dear to our hearts here at Invision. We recently went through a rebrand that espouses this very notion is how experiences and events fit into greater marketing strategy rather than a single point in time, but how the brands can own every moment with their customer. 

(09:02): 

So let's turn a little bit to how events and experiences may be integrated into that broader marketing ecosystem for tech B2B as we think about integrating it into the marketing, the omnichannel strategy and other functions. You sort of touched on this before, but if you think about it holistically and to what extent at Atlassian are the events integrated with things like demand generation or digital marketing? Is it ... Do those functions integrate? Do they find common touch points at certain times of the year, before an event or just even ongoing? Would love to hear just a little more color around that kind of approach. 

Jeremy Youett (09:45): 

Yeah, it's a great question. It's one we think about a lot certainly at Atlassian. One of the things that we've done recently to kind of create more of an ongoing engagement coming out of an event is to think about syndicating content in different ways. And we do that kind of at the moment in all digital channels. So post-event, we'll record a lot of our content, we'll feature a lot of it for digital engagement post-event. Now that's unedited, it's the full session or the full keynote with sometimes a deck or a white paper associated so that if you're really interested in a specific subject but you couldn't attend or might've missed, you've got the opportunity to engage with that content post-event. But not every customer is at the same point in their journey. 

(10:34): 

And so different customers want and need different things. And so you need to be able to extend the reach of that digital content in different ways by syndicating, by chopping it up, by using it across different channels. So that's one of the ways from an event perspective, using the event content that we think about leveraging the content that's created in our omnichannel strategy. 

(10:56): 

But there's also lots of other touch points across the full marketing ecosystem where we're going to try and engage with customers. And I spoke a little bit before about top, middle and end of funnel and the engagement for those customers at different stages of the funnel is going to be different. You want a different message and you want different interaction and content if you're a prospect looking to explore one of our products and to get to learn more about them before deciding if you want to commit and deploy. But if you're already an enterprise customer with thousands of seats making a huge commitment to our product stack, then what you want to know is how do we best leverage our investment in that product stack? So what can we do to train, to enable, to leverage learnings from other customers using customer case studies, to look at ways that different industries are solving problems that their industry might not have tackled yet using our solutions? And that's obviously a much more far-reaching conversation about omnichannel marketing strategy. 

(11:58): 

I'm not an expert in all of those different ways that the different marketing tactics can be leveraged, but I am certainly an expert in how events sit within that framework. And social is one way, the digital platform is one way that will augment and syndicate. Post-event, what we're also doing is kind of different and abridged webinars that leverage the messages versus the content in a nutshell itself. So there's various different ways to answer the question that you can think about how event content can be used across the different channels in all of your marketing efforts, both pre and post-event. 

Laliv Hadar (12:40): 

Great. And would love to hear more a little bit when you mentioned content syndication and taking the content from the event, we're definitely true believers in that and we coined the term content atomization for all intent and purposes but it's really the same idea. It's like a strategic outlook at content before the event and how to package it and then post-event too, how to sort of chop it up, dice it up if you will, and have it into chunkable content formats and ways that reach the customer where they want to be reached and so forth. So I'm curious, when you work on that content, do those people or that function, is that part of the events team or is that partnering with let's say the marketing team to help do some of that content work just from a functional perspective? 

Jeremy Youett (13:29): 

Yeah, functionally speaking, we partner with other teams. We have a life cycle marketing team that does definitely syndicate. I love atomization. I love that idea and that expression. Syndication, atomization I think of in the same way. And so we do have a team or teams that leverage the content. Social team uses it, life cycle marketing team uses it, publicity teams use it. It's used quite broadly across different marketing teams, but they all have different needs. So we go in with a plan on paper of what we think we need to edit in post immediately following delivery of content. And then for the most part, 75% of it in my experience, if you've got a plan in advance, comes out and is needed and is used in the way that you intended. 

(14:16): 

But there's always things that are not as you intended on the plan going in. And you find there's different needs, different formats, truncated versions of things that you thought might need to be 5 or 10 minutes, you want to get a 30 or 90 second clip of. So that's definitely an exercise we've been going through the last couple of weeks since we delivered our flagship event in Anaheim a few weeks back with you and IVC in partnership. And in fact, IVC is a great partner in working out how to quickly and efficiently adapt some of the intent of the content to make sure that it's aligned with the campaign messages that we were talking about earlier. 

(14:58): 

So I would say you want a plan in place to go in, but you also need to be reactive and have the ability to quickly adapt to the need. One specific example is that we've discovered a need for a very specific duration of content for a very specific platform because we're trying to reach a very specific persona there. That wasn't part of the initial plan, but neither was the persona when we were going into the event and it is now for the business a need. So what did we do? We connected, we partnered with IVC who are still right now editing some of our content, in fact, to create content that matches that need versus a lot of the stuff that they've already pushed out over the last couple of weeks. 

Laliv Hadar (15:45): 

Great. So let's switch gears and talk about measuring success and proving ROI. What are the most important KPIs event marketers should focus on to measure event success beyond just attendance, badge scans and surveys? If the goal is to make events more strategic in the marketing mix and matter more to the CMO and CRO, what KPIs are essential to measure? And maybe from your own experience, what are you guys looking at and increasingly trying to measure? 

Jeremy Youett (16:15): 

Yeah, I think about measurement for customer-facing events as being two-pronged. There's business impact metrics and then there's experiential metrics. The experiential metrics, I won't touch on. It's the obvious stuff. What does registration numbers look like? What does attendance look like? How did that convert? What do survey results look like in answering to content satisfaction or value scores? What does NPS look like? So they're things that I think are pretty table stakes for an event marketer to think about measuring. 

(16:46): 

But then for customer-facing events, the more important thing to make it relevant and to entice and show value to CMOs and CRO types is to show how you move the needle for the business. So pipeline is obviously one of those metrics that we measure. We look at influence pipeline. So how did the touch point of this event in the customer lifecycle influence the buying decision and the timing for that buying decision? And how big was the size of the deal or deals related to the event touch? We think about kind of attribution. So does a seller directly attribute the event and their experience engaging with a customer in creating certain pipeline or attributed deals? What's the kind of quality of the engagement that we're driving that's both anecdotal and data-driven based on app results and movement of people around the place and who they engaged with, when, the number of meetings, et cetera? So there's some of the ways that we think about the business side, the business impact and the ROI of the event at Atlassian. 

(17:56): 

And then of course, you need to be able to prove that the pipeline that was created from the event closes. So you want to monitor over a period of time how that pipe is moving and making sure that it closes and making sure that you've enabled your sales team to close it effectively. We tend to look about three and six months out post-event at how pipeline has either moved downstream or how events have influenced the closing of new pipeline post the event happening. So they're the kind of primary drivers for us, but then we also have a set of OKRs for the business, and the event also plays into meeting the needs of some of those OKRs for the business. And many of them are pipeline-oriented, but some of them are not. So that's another way that we look at how ROI is derived from our events. 

Laliv Hadar (18:52): 

And then in terms of, you touched on it, but that working with a sales team is really essential here to measure that pipeline movement and acceleration. How do you set, I guess, expectations with them in terms of realizing the impact of these events? I think it's pretty known that it can take a bit, those cycles are not super short, it's not like converting on an ad online, it takes longer. And how do you guys level set with them, because that is obviously key to that over time and making sure that they're also leveraging the benefit of these events and all this work that goes into it and so forth? So talk a little bit about, I guess, the partnership with sales. 

Jeremy Youett (19:34): 

Yeah, repetition of messaging is a key one, especially in the day and age of so many different channels of communication. Even internally that we engage with every day you have to say the same thing, you have to say it consistently, you have to say it over and over again to make sure that you reach everybody because saying it once will not cut it with our digital attention span these days. So repetition and clarity of message is very important. I think clarity of goals is also really important. Benchmarking. So what did you achieve last time? What do you plan to achieve this time based on the results from last time? Thinking about kind of shorter term KPIs, so how many meetings are booked or how many no-shows? What are the event-oriented specific experiential KPIs is another way to engage sales and give them a goal. 

(20:24): 

And then I think post the event, working with sales to make sure that they're enabled, making sure that they have all of the resources and know where they are, which again, in this digital age is difficult because they're on lots of different channels and we're coming at them from lots of different angles. So are there multiple places they can access the same thing? Is the message consistent that we're giving them to go enable customer conversations? Many times they'll raise a ticket with us and say, "Hey, I have a specific need for a specific asset for a specific customer. We haven't created that yet." So then making sure that we can fulfill that ask post-event is also part of having that enablement plan baked in again, remaining flexible like we spoke about before. So they're some of the ways that we think about making sure that sales is enabled to really take advantage of the opportunity. 

Laliv Hadar (21:14): 

Excellent. Well, and I think that we cannot not have a question in our discussion today around emerging technology, AI obviously being the hot word these days, generative AI and beyond really. So I'd love to spend just a few more minutes understanding how any emerging tech like AI, AR, VR, event ad analytics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the way they might be changing events as you see them at Atlassian. We are starting to see the value at Invision for things like gen AI and how, for example, it can produce real-time insights at events and some key content takeaways. I'm curious to hear what you're seeing. 

Jeremy Youett (22:00): 

Yeah, it's very timely, very topical. I think there is going to be huge impact from how AI is leveraged by companies. I do think it will have an effect on the event ecosystem and on marketing events specifically. To some extent it already is. I think most folks, especially in the tech industry, are using gen AI in the daily course of work, whether that helps you get clarity or expedite for idea generation, it's already being used to some extent, which may not be visible at the event experience level, but certainly is impacting the work. 

(22:37): 

How will it change the experience? Look verdicts out there, there's obviously companies out there, a lot of startups, a lot of event tech companies looking at how to embed AI products into their own products, whether that's to support wayfinding or matchmaking or persona driven targeting. And to some degree, those things are starting to be successful. But I think one of the challenges right now for everybody is that a lot of the AI resource is siloed and it's within the silo of that specific product or specific company that you're using, which makes it maybe slightly less useful. 

(23:16): 

I think one day the ambition for some of the big tech companies is that it's more of an ecosystem where those tools can benefit and leverage a much broader dataset and interact with much more broad and vast data ecosystems, data lakes to be more effective. So is that going to come? Yes, I think to some extent. Is it right now? Less so, but definitely seeing some ways that it is effective. We don't tend to really think about B2C activations as much because that's not where we play right now. So something like AR, VR, A, it's very hard to scale because you're putting one headset on one person at an event with thousands of people. That's a really difficult thing. I did kind of do that quite a lot at the start of HoloLens existing when I was at Microsoft, and now even that technology has become much more B2B and enterprise-focused as a technology for Microsoft than a B2C play. 

(24:20): 

So are those things fun? Are they useful? Are they used at gaming conventions? Are they used at other B2C experiences and engagements? Absolutely. Do I use them? Do my team use them right now to drive experience? Not so much. But not to say that if they don't ... If they become more scalable in future, then very well they might be. 

Laliv Hadar (24:40): 

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for being our guest today on the podcast. 

Jeremy Youett (24:47): 

So lovely to be with you. 

Laliv Hadar (24:49): 

Thank you so much. And thank you to our audience for tuning in, and we'll see you the next time. Thank you.